SpaceX's Starship Took A Beating, But Held On For First Return From Space

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SpaceX demonstrated Thursday that its towering Super Heavy booster and Starship rocket might one day soon be recovered and reused in the manner Elon Musk has envisioned for the future of space exploration.

For the first time, both elements of the nearly 400-foot-tall (121-meter) rocket not only launched successfully from SpaceX's Starbase facility near Brownsville, Texas, but also came back to Earth for controlled splashdowns at sea. This demonstration is a forerunner to future Starship test flights that will bring the booster, and eventually the upper stage, back to land for reuse again and again.

The two-stage rocket took off from Starbase at 7:50 am CDT (12:50 UTC) and headed east over the Gulf of Mexico with more than 15 million pounds of thrust, roughly twice the power of NASA's Saturn V rocket from the Apollo lunar program of the 1960s and 1970s.

Starship, the largest and powerful launch vehicle ever built, is key to the future of SpaceX. NASA also has an interest in Starship's success because the agency selected it to fill the role of human-rated lunar lander for the Artemis program to ferry astronauts to and from the surface of the Moon.

There will be dozens more Starship flights before anyone actually climbs inside the Starship lander, and this probably won't happen sooner than the latter part of this decade. But some of the other goals for Starship, such as recovering and reusing the entire rocket, appear within reach.

"The fourth flight of Starship made major strides to bring us closer to a rapidly reusable future," SpaceX said in an update on its website . "Its accomplishments will provide data to drive improvements as we continue rapidly developing Starship into a fully reusable transportation system designed to carry crew and cargo to Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars, and beyond."

Thursday's test flight was the fourth launch of a full-size Starship rocket and was the first to end with the booster and ship reaching Earth's surface in one piece. The results matched the best of all possible scenarios leading up to Thursday's flight.